ANY HUMAN HEART: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart

Categories used to bundle characteristics of related subjects -- those characteristics having been developed in differing circumstances and over time -- often become fenced off into obligatory interrelated elements of a particular kind of somethingorother.  These structures or tags can then be used by authors for the sake of their own work.  One example might be the “road story.”  Another might be a “journal” imitation that leads the supposed journaling character through interesting times and places.

Last night I marathoned the four hours of  Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart, (on disc at Netflix)  derived from a 2002 novel by William Boyd, a British writer. The fictional Mountstuart, a writer whose life is like a game of billiards, bouncing around the green felt table of the 20th century.  Major forces -- at least in terms of the Atlantic world (which generously includes Uruguay and non-English speaking countries in Europe) -- are interpreted as good luck or bad luck, which seems justified since no one inquires into causes or seems to have any control. 

Book

Video

Here’s the part interesting to English professors and the reason I ordered the discs.  Boyd plays ironically on the theme of literary celebrity, introducing his protagonist to several real writers who are included as characters.  The helpful but anonymous writer of the Wikipedia entry tells us:  “Boyd spent 30 months writing the novel. The journal style, with its gaps, false starts and contradictions, reinforces the theme of the changing self in the novel. Many plot points simply fade away. The novel received mixed reviews from critics on publication, but has sold well.”  . . .

“The story was inspired by the journals written by writer and critic Cyril Connolly in the 1920s.”  “Cyril Vernon Connolly (10 September 1903 – 26 November 1974) was a literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon (1940–49) and wrote Enemies of Promise (1938), which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he had aspired to be in his youth.”

Connolly’s defense goes to class, and therefore becomes political.  "We have seen that there are two styles which it is convenient to describe as the realist, or vernacular, the style of rebels, journalists, common-sense addicts, and unromantic observers of human destiny – and the Mandarin, the artificial style of men of letters or of those in authority who make letters their spare time occupation."

William Boyd

The great irony, not addressed by Boyd, is that yesterday’s vernacular becomes today’s Mandarin:  Joyce, Hemingway, Kerouac, et al.  Of course, some vernaculars are born of resentful revolution and are so muscular that they persist politically even when they go out of style, accessible only to the Mandarin intellectuals.  I’m talking about the post-structuralists and all the other post-whatevers that overturn hegemony.  For example, the politically correct accusations adopted by the American Indian Movement, which became a “devolution” into a straightforward demand for reparation.  Not that it wasn’t completely justified.  

As the lockstep Mandarins have aged out of today's universities, the newest generation is left reduced to outlines and shadows.  They have a renewed fascination with what Boyd calls “S and M” novels, defined as “Sex and Money.”  The kinkier and more resourceful the money-handling is, and the more warnings of financial implosion there are, the better the book sells.  It is the M that dominates.  S trails along behind.

But Boyd’s version of life is dominated by the S, as Logan Montstuart marks his fortunes according to with whom he sleeps, and though their personalities and attractions are quite various, he can’t keep their names straight.  Clearly, it is not about the other person in the relationship and therefore it is not about anyone but himself.  The exception is the parallel paths taken by his lifelong friends.  One takes the vernacular popular path and is a huge success.  The other takes the rarefied life of a gallery owner and is able to help Montstuart until this faithful friend dies of prostate cancer -- bad luck.

The novel's imagined version.

Montstuart is always on the verge of writing a best-selling book, he thinks, but he falls between chairs.  His first book is too much S and the second is too Mandarin.  Unable to figure it out and preoccupied with the problems at hand, he puts writing off and off and off, until in the end he has only eight piles of remnants from his life, one for each woman. Ironically, these journals become the book he didn’t write.  It is a best-seller and young men read it avidly, in hopes of finding clues to success.  What can that advice be except to keep on keeping on?

Is there a difference between journals, diaries, and today’s blogging?  The medium in which writing is done has always had impact on the content, from quills on parchment through ink on paper, from isolated one-off chapbooks of poetry for one’s own eyes, to mass-produced newspapers and on to subscription-only high-art handmade books, as much about the font, binding, and presentation as about subject.  I'll put off the blogging question, because I think it is multiple choice.

frontispiece

An extremely fine book in concept and execution is “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea”, elegant and political, even in concept.  http://www.peterkochprinters.com/show.php?bookid=75

Debra Magpie Earling

Debra Magpie Earling, the poet, inspired the content, by giving Sacajawea a voice.  Peter Koch, the inspiree, persuaded her to expand her poems and managed and illustrated the publishing.  I haven’t read it because it is too expensive: $4500.  “The spine is beaded with trade beads and small caliber cartridge cases.”  Thus it exists as a reversal of the strange hybrid vernacular/Mandarin “world” that is Lewis and Clark, but also crosses into the world of Material Culture, as a Native American artifact made by Europeans.  From the beginning it was a paradoxical written work pretending to be created by an illiterate person from an oral culture.  But it must have had a reality.

I think there is only one library in Montana that owns a copy but it is too far away for me to drive there over the Rocky Mountains in my failing pickiup.  

"Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian"

by George Devereaux

Perhaps some day I’ll write an imitation “dream diary” equivalent to what I thought I was buying when I acquired a copy of the book called “Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian” by George Devereaux, published in 1951.  I bought it late one night at the Powell’s in Hyde Park, under the impression that Devereux was Blackfeet, since it’s a common Metis name around Browning.

“Reality and Dream” turned out to be about PTSD, not that helpful since it was still early after WWII and theory was not far along.  The movie, “Jimmy P.” upgraded the theories a bit.  It could not avoid showing the environment of the rez that created “Jimmy,” and the four Plains tribes that Devereaux conflated into the “Wolf” tribe.  The discussion of these matters is valuable -- worth being republished as a small stand-alone book -- but it is non-Indian, so mostly based on short sojourns with the tribes, usually in summer.

Journals and diaries are “found” writing as opposed to designed, shaped and marketed.  Since uniqueness has always been a value enhancer, it’s fortunate that humans are so various, but the supply never quite matches the value assigners -- some are over-estimated and others are certainly neglected.  This suggests the premise of “Any Human Heart” -- that it’s just a matter of luck, good or bad.  So what DOES guide the discerning of value in the creation of a book?

THE BIGGEST PICTURE

It’s hard to believe that I moved back here in 1999, which now amounts to sixteen years.  Things have changed considerably.  I did get the book about Bob Scriver written and published, just barely before the whole publishing industry collapsed.  But I have not been able to redeem Bob’s work from the profit stranglers who control Western art.  The best thing about this Charley Russell trope was that it was land-based and authentic.  That was left behind long ago.

The whole concept of “reservations” for a captured indigenous people has changed radically, which means that my thinking about them must also change.  This empowers my thought about the environmental movement that has always been present in one form or another.  What was specific and experienced has now become planetary and even cosmic.  My grandfather's Rodale organic gardening and Bob's practice of keeping “wild” pets as babies have now become concerns about universal chemical pollution and the extinction of species.  So many people are concerned and involved that the flow of information and concepts and the demand for response is almost overwhelming.  

Another self-assigned task has been preserving and using my father’s photos, not because they were artistic or historic, but because they illustrate a little strand of life across time.  In researching the genealogy that they record, I discovered many things, including distortions and tragedies.  My family has not wanted to hear about these, because their idea of the virtue of relatives is fragile.  We are separated now.

The connected steps I’m following are:  cosmology leads to planetary morphology leads to geology leads to ecology leads to the historical formation of cultures leads to human individuation leads to creations.  There is no reference to theology.  Its place is taken by survival of elements at each step.

Parallel to all this has been trying to keep up with what a human being is and does, particularly in terms of neuro- research.  There are five aspects to this:

1. The specialization and collaboration of one-celled creatures into complex animals.  This is crucial to brain function.
2. The message system of the whole body -- not just the senses represented by organs like eye and ear, but the hundreds of small awarenesses, roughly sorted into internal vs. external at the skin barrier but including every tissue and extending down to the molecular level.  Action responses are included from molecular secretions to whole-animal skilled exertions like athletic feats.  Some estimate that there are 200 differently specialized brain cells assigned to subtle perceptions like whether one is right-side-up (head on top for humans).
3. Empathic access to the thoughts and feeling-states of other people through identification, special “mirror” functions of cells in the pre-frontal cortex, experience, and communication systems like speaking, music, art, and words, both oral and written.  Results might include bonding, families, patriotism.
4. “Group think” which is a phenomenon that forms spontaneously, an aggregate of individual ideas and responses.  Philosophies and governments.  A weltanschaung.
5. Interaction with the infinite, including planetary conditions, sun storms, and massive evolutions of creatures and phenomena.  A consciousness that there is far far far more than we CAN know.

“Millennials” are so different from me that I not only don’t understand them, but I begin to resent them for their narcissistic domination of so much.  On the other hand, I’m old enough to see how change ripples through everything, most of it useless to oppose.  Peoples who have lived through the Great Depression or the World Wars were stretched to their limits and knew it.  

The generation that has been in control of the US and probably much of the English-speaking world is just about gone.  I relate to them better than to my own generation, partly because of the ten years with a man so much older and partly because of being in Browning, which is just leaving the 19th century.  But my own generation is dying as well.  

A K-12 Portland classmate died last week -- a woman who had a heart attack.  (Actually, I see by her obit that she was only my classmate after 1947 -- moving from California.) This person was intelligent and conventional, charming and dependable, quite mild and gentle.  She had two children but her husband, whom she met on vacation in San Francisco, somehow evaporated, probably about the time she went to PSU for an advanced degree.  Her work was books and then computers.  She was the kind of person I was expected to be, but risked and paid dearly NOT to be.  I don’t know where that difference came from except that at some point it dawned on me that it was better to actually live adventures than to just imagine them.

It made a difference that our teachers at Vernon and Jefferson -- and then later in university -- were mostly born at the turn of the 19th century, just before WWI, about the age of Bob Scriver.  It was a time about to turn violent and by WWII to murder children as well as destroying cities.  Our teachers were educated just at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties when all was optimism and determination, but the war had decimated men of an age to marry them: anyway they were few and scarred.  The Edwardian women threw their hearts into secondary education.  They were not allowed to teach in universities, so they taught what is now considered graduate level to adolescents who barely grasped it.  Here we were, pondering Kitto and Edith Hamilton.

That generation witnessed the desperate war against Nazism, an evil and oily snake impossible to kill.  The Millennials so enjoy waving the ghosts and skulls around to upset their elders.  They give it Goth Glam, quite unconscious of how easy it is to commit genocide.  In fact, they have a hard time thinking of adults as human.

Now both the brokenness of war, often internal to what was thought of as a group joined by faith, and the continuousness and interwovenness of human-caused destruction (sometimes identified as Evil), are becoming clear but not effectively opposed.  We keep trying to "solve" it.   We begin to think that the roots are paleobiological tendrils reaching back so far they are invertebrate.

I have no way of knowing how many years I have left, but a felt obligation to do something with them.  I no longer have the illusion that I can influence others -- that was snuffed by ministry.  The drive to write remains strong for its own sake.  I do have a passionate sense of what I love to write about.  I want the basics, the foundational concepts that are transforming right now.  

Why else would I live along the Rockies where the planetary plate tectonics have thrust up ramparts of stone and some day in that rain shadow grass and forbes might return to replace the human-distorted monoculture of grain because climate change from rising temps have prevented industrial irrigation.  We are told that we’re about due for another immense upthrust, a massive earthquake.  We are told that the two sub-continental plates press together so hard that the earth vibrates with stress, a kind of unheard resonance, all the way down the Old North Trail to the tip of South America.  It is a mystical idea that some claim to feel physically.

My understanding is not of the Christian petulant insistence on their individual survival in Heaven, but rather a kind of Taoist acceptance of my participation in these interacting forces.  I have no idea which action or thought or insight on my part will affect the future, but it is inescapable that my small actions, even washing the dishes, have impact.  (I may be creating a new life form in my neglected dishpan.)  Or maybe a word-scrap of my old-fashioned lyric realism will trigger something transformative in someone not born yet, just as reading has done for me.

ME AND JOHN BOEHNER

Boehner

John Boehner and I share a problem: we don’t fit our own demographic anymore.  The Pope told him to get out, or maybe it was more like setting him free in a way that served certain political interests.  They say that the Repubs who are intractable have tried to get rid of him for a long time.  No wonder he pulls a cry face.  I wish him well.  I think the Pope simply realized how miserable he was.   

As a result of the resignation, they say it’s more possible that the government won't shut down again and this time not even pay out Social Security.  (I noted that my bank seems to be bracing for that possibility.)  For me and a lot of other people around here, that would be a catastrophe, but for those who are already prosperous and thinking like the retro-Texans they really are, it will be considered a deserved punishment for people who refuse to admit what deadbeats they are: sick, homebound, useless old people.  What good are they?  They’re not OUR families.  Get rid of all outliers: they’re inefficient. 

Along with other “cost saving measures” as the CEO’s say, I personally have ended my posts at Medium.com, a platform for writers that is based in San Francisco.  Actually, I was just reposting what I’d already written for this blog (prairiemary.blogspot.com) but once in a while I’d do something a little more “edgy” and put it on Medium.

American Asian edgy: the Fifties return

The first truth from my point of view is that since it’s a “young” startup, it still had strange features that didn’t quite work.  The more serious problem was cultural: the focus was on the technicalities of the code.  Code was what they wrote, not narrative print.  The majority of them are coming from other cultures so that their dominant shared mode in this country is the tech world that accepts all code languages and, inevitably, code values.  They are the values of the factory:  reliable, uncomplaining, productive, cheerful, round-the-clock.  

I asked to be removed in early evening last night.  In spite of getting a message saying that I should not try to interact with them except 9 to 5, M to F, Pacific time, a techie responded at 1:30AM, evidently working from home on his own schedule.  He did not say he WOULD remove me, but only that he COULD.  I think he was afraid to make a decision until he consulted with his masters.  His only caveat was that I would lose all the writing I’d posted.  Right.  That’s why I print out anything I value, which is not necessarily very much.

The writers themselves are grouped by organizing into “domains” and by the practices of the techies, who supply the “tags” that “will let more people find you.”  Aside from dumb automated tags (every time I write about Indians they tag it “vacation” or “travel”) there are all sorts of other gizmos: the usual hearts, thumbs, and comments, but also provision for long responses (except that I can never figure out where they going to be put -- in my writing path or the other person’s writing) and for high-lighting the parts they like or differ from.  (One of mine really hit the spot with one reader -- he high-lighted the whole darn thing!  But no comments.  Was it objection or endorsement?)  

There’s a little two-step at the point of completion:  do you want it to be seen by only your friends (which is a dangerous idea in a world where everybody always sees everything eventually -- something politicians are slow to realize) or by the general public?  The second step is what rights you reserve, which indulges the fantasy that you can do such a thing, since everyone pirates everything.  But it does offer Creative Commons as a choice, which I think is a good idea, if ineffective.

After that, if your post is re-blogged or admired by someone, a little reminder goes out to the email of that someone’s “friends” who are really commenters and up-thumbers.  The idea that is encouraged is like-grouped-with-like,  a school of fish, “groupers.”  That is, mer-persons resembling shepherd dogs who want to gather and sort everything.  (“Let’s get this party organized!”)  

“We” want to be predictable.  No surprises.  We do not want to be rebuked; we are faultless.  And we are entitled, because we are techies and computers are no mystery to us -- therefore we understand the universe.  At least a gaming type universe with algorithms, Sim City.  We don’t do rural -- too messy.  Only peasants there.  It’s all very Seventh Grade, when adolescence begins, maybe because entering puberty is quite like entering a strange country with an uncertain culture.  Or coming from one, namely Suburbia.

The content is a different story.  Now anything goes -- “we’re not kids anymore” (But they still sounds like kids to me) so we can talk about our suicide attempts, our failures at gauging sexual hookups, and a lot of menacing mood pieces about emo weather.  What a great time for those people right now!  Everyone on pills, standing in the rain, staring at the window of the Beloved One.

There seems to be a fantasy that this platform is like an MFA class, basically Seinfeld.  That people will help each other develop by correcting their grammar and composition structure.  A few take this seriously, the same ones who write long letters of advice for their younger siblings.  "You must double-space," said one.  "Post a more cheerful photo," advised another.  One man in England who was organizing a “domain” invited me to join.  He admitted that I would probably be the one providing help, not the receiver.  I declined.  I’ve done that for years.  No more. 

The writers pursue the topics popular in magazines, but I do not see the loose and energetic prose of the zines.  Mixing it up with Manhattan Slid-Yiddish words, Black ghetto inventions of metaphor, Brit rhyming slang, captured sub-Spanish dialect, words truncated to type with thumbs, and -- hey, don’t the Chinese do slang?  No no no.  Proper English.

I joined Medium and Aeon (briefly) at about the same time and it was soon obvious how different they are.  Medium was for ambitious writers who valued conformity and didn’t quite have a grasp on the humanities.  Aeon was for snobs who could produce vids, but specifically for the ones who wanted to preserve what they took to be basic premises:  that there is a God, so it only remains to define Him; that such a thing as genius exists and ought to be given privilege; that deep science (once it’s translated into a charming video) is a proper subject for educated people.  (I agree with that last one.)

Earlier in my life -- I’m surprised to realize as long ago as twenty years (1995??!!) --  my denomination changed out from under me -- though it’s explicitly based on the inclusion of everyone.  Partly it was undone by political correctness, which assumes that if you use the right words no one will notice that you secretly despise some category of humans, and partly it was the assumption of entitlement on the part of the younger people: that there was no need for them to take a turn at the boring stuff (setting up chairs) and they were overqualified for things like making the budget sensible.  Luckily Blacks are taking up the slack.  They know where the power is.

But the more universal and penetrating problem has been that traditional assumptions about the nature of the real world have dispersed.   Nothing is solid now.  A human being is a flowing, transforming set of processes.  A planet has a mind of its own and can simply wipe us out.  If electricity (power) stopped existing tomorrow, all our fancy extensions of communication, travel and commerce would be dead.  We couldn't buy a cup of coffee or pump a gallon of gas.

And maybe most importantly, human beings “in the aggregate” have a kind of group mind that responds like a whole school of fish or flock of birds that can turn inside out, swerve sharply, or simply drop out of the sky.  Gone.  No reason we can think of.  What we do now might have some impact, but we’ve already had a big part in making this world intractable.  

IS THE POPE A SUCCESS?

Is the Pope a success?  Doesn’t it depend on how you look at him?  By Ratsinger’s point of view, meaning conventional, historic standards -- rigid, seeking irreproachability without any attention to results?  By Abraham Lincoln’s or Martin Luther King’s standards, both responding to the original American trafficking sin -- that of bringing captured people to America to serve as slaves?  (Sex was the least of it.)  By the standards of the indigenous people of both Americas whose lands were simply seized with the help of disease?

In terms of popularity he IS a success, movie star adulation with the added dimension of Heaven.  In terms of his own, which rest very much on the family, he is a paradox, a man sworn to celibacy who reaches out to the biological family, nuclear or extended.  But he is also sensitive to the idea of the created family in relationship so long as its center is mutual protection for the survival of itself and others, including their dogs.  (If you’re going to imagine something, why not include both dogs and giraffes?  Or as another famous theologian put it, “We don’t know whether there are dogs in heaven, but there ought to be.”)

In terms of impact on civilization in our times, it’s mixed.  Ask a nun.  In terms of impact on his own people, it’s mixed.  The problem again is that for some people he’s a rousing success, but those are not people who were included before, so pulling them in changes everything.  Is change a success?  At one time being Catholic meant NOT being President of the USA in the same way that being Muslim means inelectability in our times -- so far.  Now it’s a big asset to be Catholic, but there are not enough priests to serve the parishes.  Everyone loves the Pope, few trust their priest.

Some don't even trust their mirror.

In our times image is all.  So if the Pope and Peter Dinklage ran against each other for President of the USA, which one would win?  At one time it would have been unthinkable for a genetically short person to have been shown on television having hot sex and winning wars.  Of course, before JFK the same went for US presidents.  It’s easier to think of Benedict up to no good.  The screenwriters have already shown us that a female president wouldn’t be that different from dubious characters -- being female is not a guarantee of being good and being good is not a guarantee of being effective.

Anyway we can’t decide whether we want an effective president -- many would rather the power rested with Congress.  Not many think of the Supreme Court as trustworthy these days, not after throwing election of the president into the laps of the secretly powerful, the quiet international corporations that really run the world.  At least the Pope knows that.

He is a man sensitive to structures in society that make all the monetary values in capitalism serve only the few, while Jesus’ radical idea of empowering “the least of these” -- shared by other great leaders -- is only used to argue for obedience.  Francis I must throw his prestige and popularity against the same sort of values that built the Roman Empire which was the pattern for the Roman Catholic Church.  We forget that there were branches that are not Roman and they still exist.

Peter Dinklage in character

Being Pope became a powerful force when Europe was in turmoil.  The nations were forming and even the system of attaching entitlement to genetic linear descent -- inheritance -- was not enough to keep order.  The Pope rose as a way of claiming God was willing and able to determine which occupant of which throne was valid.  Can Francis I do that?  Someone needs to.  In history it was war and finally the dread of experienced war that decided which way things went.  In a time of polarized dissension, as intense as the Thirty Years War or the World Wars, we badly need a rallying point.

But the Pope was merely speaking to the US Congress, asking THEM to be the rallying point -- not the United Nations.  This is good strategy for dealing with people who think they are more important than everyone else -- give them responsibility commensurate with their power.  There’s no crown or throne.

Predator drones of two sorts

But there are dragons -- predator drones -- and there is a body of thought that’s based on those deadly and brutal European wars.  I’m talking about “Game of Thrones,” of course.  I would argue that the popularity of this program is based on its ability to explore contemporary politics, under-culture, criminal culture, sequestered culture, and all the rest.    It’s not that one can assign White Walkers to one group and slave keepers to another, but that it gets us to think about the patterns, the obsessive recurrence of things we abhor and KNOW don’t work.  So far I see no signs of a Pope.

When I was actually “preaching,” I used to return to the trope of “after.”  After Christmas worked pretty well, because Boxing Day -- typically British -- was about restoring order to goods, totting up accounts, and eating leftovers.  The day after you get what you want, is often a powerful space for thinking, esp. if change is involved.  Often the intense focus on preparation turns out to have been the best part of the event.

We need to think about what we will do after the Pope goes back home.  In fact, it is inevitable that Francis I will die -- he knows that.  Then who gets elected?  Beyond that, some day the Holy Roman Church will collapse and no longer exist.  What will take its place?  Will there even be a United States by then?  Now those investor folks are busy pretending they own parts of the Moon, trying to figure out how to make money from that.  So far the best bet has been throwing the ash remains of important people at it by using very expensive rockets.  Our mix of ancient rites with contemporary hopes is proving to be lethal, especially to good ideas.

One of the most dangerous ideas still new but disintegrating, is the double-headed invention of record-keeping as money, and the devising of the internet which was almost immediately pressed into the same template.  We forget that the combination is entirely controlled by the supply of electricity, which is still limited, guided through constantly decaying infrastructure, and vulnerable to secret but remarkably broad attacks.  The OFF switch exists.

So many of us are feeling the urgency of finding more security.  Paradoxically, the most effective strategy appears to be communicating through the Internet.  So this morning I sit here in my nightgown with a shawl over my shoulders listening to an old Argentine man dressed all in white, including his short cape, and agreeing with him.  Meanwhile in Sacred Pilgrimage, more than 800 Muslims press each other to death in their desperate attempt to find supernatural confirmation of their success.  Kenner would say, “What does it mean?”  The Pope would advise us not to withhold pity and help from them.  What would Peter Dinklage say?  What bitterly compassionate summary?

Francis by Patrick J. Marrin

• September 24, 2015
• From Beginning
• Previous feature
• 

MARTIN SHKRELI IS A SHRKUNK

MARTIN SHKRELI IS A SHRKUNK

Martin Shkreli is a shrkunk. Clearly he is an extortionist price-gouger when he raises the price of Daraprim, which is the only effective toxoplasmosis drug, from $13.50 to $750. They’re calling it a niche drug, and saying that toxoplasmosis is a rare disease. That’s wrong. What he’s really doing is soiling his own nest.

When pregnant women are told never to touch a cat litter box or garden where cats do their business, it is because otherwise they might catch the toxo worm. It goes to the brain of the developing fetus and makes cysts there that will destroy the child.

When researchers discovered a parasite that would infect rats and make them like the smell of cat pee enough to draw them into danger, that was toxo.

When I was doing education for the Multnomah County Animal Control program, I attended a workshop where I had a chance to visit with my equivalent from Seattle. She said that her daughter, who was about ten, had been complaining that a shadow was crossing her vision. Taken to the doc, she was diagnosed with a toxo worm cruising around in the fluid of her eyeball.

toxo inhabiting a retina

Toxoplasmosis is NOT rare, NOT just infecting a few people, but rather a common part of the environment that is usually suppressed by a vigorous immune system — IF you have such an advantage. Pregnant women, old folks, people on HIV drugs (NOT just gay men) or cancer chemo, people who have had organ transplants, people under unusual stress of others kinds, all need this drug. It is also a malaria drug. Malaria kills many more people than ebola or even HIV.

Daraprim is NOT an orphan drug. It has been used for more than sixty years. No one complained about losing money on it before. I smell a rat and it’s a big fat bush rat.

bush rat

It suddenly came to this sheltered little twit that the US government was paying out a lot of money for drugs in Africa: ebola, malaria, HIV, cholera. So he wanted to get in the exploitation line. What was left for the defiant little hedge-fund worm was parasites. (One shouldn’t just mock people one doesn’t like, but this twitchy fellow needs to work on his image.) The suggestion of a program that would subsidize elimination of more African parasites was made not long ago. USA or maybe the Gates Foundation. There will be a LOT of drug sales. Martin Shkreli is the anti-Jimmy Carter, seeking to profit off something that might otherwise be as admirable as Carter’s elimination of guinea worm.

https://www.clinicalkey.com/topics/infectious-disease/toxoplasmosis.html

KEY POINTS FROM THE ABOVE WEBSITE

• Toxoplasmosis is an infection caused by the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii that results in serious disease, primarily in immunocompromised patients, patients with multiorgan involvement, and neonates with congenital infection
• The clinical presentation varies depending on the route of transmission, the immune status of the patient, the stage of infection, and the specific organ(s) or body system(s) involved; these factors are important in establishing the diagnosis
• Diagnosis of acute T. gondii infection during pregnancy is particularly important because of the risks to the newborn secondary to congenital infection. Pregnant women with newly acquired infection who are seronegative should receive treatment to help avoid transmission to the fetus and congenital infection. If the child is seropositive at birth or in early infancy, treatment should be initiated to prevent symptomatic infection or limit sequelae
• Immunocompromised patients, such as patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) or transplant recipients, require education on prevention of infection and possibly prophylactic treatment based on immune status and results of serologic testing; for example, prophylaxis is indicated in HIV-positive patients with a CD4 count <100 nbsp="">
• Treatment with pyrimethamine, sulfadiazine, and leucovorin can result in improvement in immunocompromised patients with acute or reactivated infection and in patients with congenital infection

Go to the link for more info. A little fewer than a fourth of the women in the US have toxo encysted in their flesh. It will do no harm so long as the woman’s immune system is handling it or unless she becomes pregnant. The most common route of infection is undercooked meat. I presume that includes sushi.

MEMEMEMEME!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150915211324.htm Another interesting link.

The anonymous author on Wikipedia says, “Pyrimethamine (trade name Daraprim) is a medication used for protozoal infections. It is commonly used as an antimalarial drug (for both treatment and prevention of malaria), and to treat Toxoplasma gondii infections, particularly when combined with the sulfonamide antibiotic sulfadiazine when treating HIV-positive individuals.

It is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines, the most important medications needed in a basic health system.”

“The Nobel Prize-winning American scientist Gertrude Elion developed the drug at Burroughs-Wellcome (now part of GlaxoSmithKline) to combat malaria. Daraprim has been available since 1953, meaning the patent for Pyrimethamine has expired. In the United States the market for this product is quite small so no generic manufacturer has emerged. In 2010 GlaxoSmithKline sold the marketing rights for Daraprim to CorePharma and in 2015 the rights were bought by Turing Pharmaceuticals.”

Martin Shkreli is like that guy who tried to copyright the tune of “Happy Birthday” so he could prevent everyone from singing it unless they paid him money. I hope that the backlash will end up nationalizing his pharmaceutical company. It should at least trigger a lot of regulations.

Who does he think he is?

Turing Pharmaceuticals, which is a company that Shkreli invented, will probably not manufacture this drug. He has no lab nor machinery. It’s all paper. His next swindle will be to sell it to a proper drug company, now that he has triggered the media to make a big fuss over it. Free publicity! I think these transactions should be carefully investigated.

Here’s the next step: “In 2011, researchers discovered that pyrimethamine can increase ß-hexosaminidase activity, thus potentially slowing down the progression of late-onset Tay–Sachs disease. It is being evaluated in clinical trials as a treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”

In the United States, as of 2015, with the acquisition of U.S. marketing of Daraprim tablets by Turing Pharmaceuticals, Daraprim has become a single-source and specialty pharmacy item, and the cost of Daraprim has increased. The cost of a monthly course for a person on 75 mg dose rose to about $75,000/month, from $13/tablet to $833/tablet, or $750 per tablet per a New York Times report from September 2015. Outpatients can no longer obtain Daraprim from their community pharmacy, but only through a single dispensing pharmacy, Walgreens Specialty Pharmacy, and institutions can no longer order from their general wholesaler, but have to set up an account with the Daraprim Direct program. The price increase has been fiercely criticised by physician groups such as HIV Medicine Associates and Infectious Diseases Society of America.

In India, multiple combinations of generic pyrimethamine are available for a price ranging from U.S. $0.05–$0.10 each (3–7 rupees). In the UK, the same drug is available from GSK at a cost of U.S. $20 (£13) for 30 tablets (approx. $0.66 each).

I suspect that this value gradient will cause people to use whatever resources they can to get what they need. I mean, I buy books on the Internet from many countries. We are setting up a system that goes around all safeguards.

This statement from FierceBioTech.com is quite explicit.

Meanwhile, Turing has already committed some of its new cash, this week paying Impax Laboratories ($IPXL) $55 million for the U.S. rights to Daraprim, an FDA-approved treatment for the parasitic disease toxoplasmosis. Turing says it plans to build out a pipeline of therapies for the infection, which the CDC cites as the second leading cause of death by foodborne illness.

Shkreli’s tenure at Retrophin came to an end in October when his board ousted him amid accusations of stock impropriety and concerns about his occasionally brash Twitter persona. But he managed to take three Retrophin assets with him on the way to founding Turing, picking up a hypertension drug his new company believes could treat autism, an intranasal formulation of oxytocin and a ketamine spray in development for depression. Moving forward, Turing will operate much like Retrophin, looking “to buy dollar bills for 50 cents,” as Shkreli told Forbes in February.

Oxytocin and ketamine. Hmmmm.